Chris Dixon

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For a Grieving Optimism

The Fall 2018 issue of Canadian Dimension features this piece, my “writing with movements” column for the magazine. This one is co-written with Alexis Shotwell. I’m reposting it here with links included.

Climate change is hitting hard. The
heat waves and fires of this past summer – and this fall’s storms and tornados
– are just the most recent manifestations.

We are living in a future many people
worked to prevent, which is also a future some actively accept even though it
produces ecological destruction in service to profit. The science fiction
writer William Gibson is often quoted as saying, “The future is already here;
it’s just not evenly distributed.” Usually we think of this in terms of the
distributions of good things. However, as anti-poverty activist and scholar Virginia
Eubanks notes,
Gibson’s quote can also help us see the uneven distribution of suffering. And,
indeed, the people most directly experiencing the pain and death of climate
change are not the people responsible for causing it.

But global transformation is coming
even for those who have been most protected so far. Increasingly, we see
reporting of the possibility that it
is too late to stop the effects of global
warming or that we are simply doomed.

Common responses to this unfolding
transformation include denial (“we’re just having a hot summer”), despair (“there’s
nothing we can do, might as well take long plane trips while we can”), and an
approach we could call dystopian (“there’s nothing we can do, but we should
actively know about how truly terrible things are”). This last approach calls
for more attention to the catastrophe humanity faces. In this vein, the Marxist
writer Richard Seymour contends
that the apocalyptic tone about climate change needs to go further: “If you
think something can be done, you will be serious and urgent rather than
facetious. The catastrophists are the optimists here.”

While Seymour elaborates many of the
ways that things are catastrophically bad, he doesn’t offer a picture of what
kind of optimist it’s possible for catastrophists to be. And just focusing on
scaring people has limited effects; at least in encouraging people to shift
their behaviors around health, we know that fear
sometimes works for one-time changes,
but not for ongoing, systematic change efforts. As radical writer and broadcaster
Sasha Lilley points
out, we should thus be wary of
catastrophism on the left: “An awareness of the scale or severity of
catastrophe does not ineluctably steer one down a path of radical politics.”
It’s not necessarily the case that things have to feel much worse before we
work on making them much better.

Here, we think of Tank
Girl, a comic book character living in a
devastated world. In one frame, she pulls on her boots for the day, cigarette
dangling from her mouth and a coffee cup beside her. She thinks, “I can’t let
things be this way. We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn
this shit around.” What can we learn from Tank Girl?

Perhaps we can be grieving
optimists. We can have what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci popularized as “pessimism
of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Pessimism of the intellect means refusing
to shy away from how bad things are; instead, it is to examine the world
realistically and seriously consider worst-case scenarios. It also means
understanding that destroying places and people for profit is not
human nature; it is capitalism. And in this
moment, mourning comes along with understanding: the human and non-human beings,
ecosystems, ways of life, and ordinary happinesses that we have lost and will
lose deserve our grief.

We can also organize. Optimism of
the will means that, although we perceive how bad things are, we act anyhow. Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear observes
that Indigenous people have been living in a post-apocalyptic world for centuries.
Those of us who are settlers could learn something about carrying on after devastation;
there is grief, but there is also persistence and resurgence.

Optimism of the will isn’t about
individual heroism. It’s about acting with other people to create conditions so
that what currently seems impossible becomes possible. We’ve witnessed this
most recently in fights against resource extraction and transport projects. The
victory represented by the August Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the Trans
Mountain Pipeline is one clear example. That ruling was propelled by Indigenous-led
struggles that, through fierce collective
action across the Canadian context, shifted the project from a done deal to an
open question.

Organizing out of our grief for this
planet and all of us on it rests on the certain knowledge that, for the vast
majority of us who are not rich, most of the problems facing us now are at a
scale beyond our individual capacity to solve. The way to be a grieving
optimist is to band together with others who care about this world, and to struggle.

We can be wonderful. We can be
magnificent. We can turn this shit around.